Electronic communication technologies (e.g., facsimile, text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and online collaboration solutions such as blogs and forums) typically make the sharing of information vastly easier and accessible to users. Users across the world are more often collaborating and communicating using such electronic communication technologies due to the increasing ease and access offered.
However, with such vast amounts of information being shared, searching for relevant sources of information, and mining the relevant sources for the correct information is becoming more difficult. To address the growing needs for relevant information retrieval and data mining, specialized services (e.g., search engines) are typically used. Most search engines are generic, and designed to operate based on keywords. Some specialized search engines also offer metadata based searching. However, generating reliable metadata for running such specialized search engines is a difficult, time consuming, and resource intensive activity. Even so, specialized search engines exist that cater to a specific community, such as the scientific community, the medical community, the business research community, the patent community, and so forth.
A large percentage of relevant information lies within the communication of a user with other individuals. Currently, there are few search engines that are powerful enough to effectively mine information contained within communication messages. Most rely on keyword searching, or communication header searching.